During the past year we have seen many posts comparing the two main plugins for SEO: WordPress SEO by Yoast and All In One SEO Pack. On those posts the pros and cons of both plugins were pointed out, as were the different tastes and experiences of their authors and of the readers who commented them. There are even posts telling you how to migrate from one plugin to the other, like this post from last December on WP Mayor.
So I don´t plan to write just one more post giving you my personal opinion and backing it up with technical details. If you want to know it, I prefer WordPress SEO by Yoast and that is what I´m using for this website.
I should say that I consider All in One SEO Pack a great plugin though. I have used it and I liked it, and I still keep it on some of my clients sites because they are happy with it and they don´t want to spend any time getting acquainted to another plugin. They already feel they are doing something quite natural by filling out the fields provided by this plugin whenever they write a new post, just in the same way they have done it so far.
That said, I´ll let you know that the approach I´m taking today is not based on opinions and experiences but on facts. What I´ll consider is which one of these two plugins is more popular now, and also which one is more popular when it comes to the most popular sites.
And the winner is…. WordPress SEO by Yoast.
Why am I so sure about it? Let me explain myself.
If we want to talk about facts and not about opinions, what objective data do we have to choose from? I guess most of you would agree that the main candidate figures would be available through the WordPress Plugin Directory, namely:
- The number of times each plugin was downloaded
- The star rating for each plugin
Now if we were to use those figures, we would get that All in One SEO Pack has been downloaded 4 times more than WordPress SEO by Yoast (13,315,144 downloads vs. 3,216,248 at the time this post is being written). On the other hand, WordPress SEO by Yoast hits 4.7 out of 5 stars, against 3.8 out of 5 stars for All in One SEO Pack.
What does this mean? Is this a tied match because one plugin clearly wins when considering downloads but the other wins if we consider the star rating? I don´t think so.
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